Flaming Mercury 2: All Is Pink

Of all the imaginary albums I've made myself in recent years--a fun little diversion for someone trying to keep his favorite albums fresh after a few decades of spins--my favorite is my mash-up of The Flaming Lips' Soft Bulletin and Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs into the truly epic Flaming Mercury's Deserter's Bulletin. As those two records were recorded at roughly the same time, in the same studio, with the same producer, as the bands explored some similar sonic inclinations, they meshed together perfectly, and alternating back-and-forth between the two bands still came out sounding like a unitary record.

For some reason, I never thought about making a sequel until this past week, when I was revisiting the Lips' 2002 follow-up, Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, and lamenting that I've never really enjoyed it as much as some of the band's prior work. It's got some fantastic songs, but the electronic atmospherics lack the big, bold, almost proggy anthems of Bulletin. But maybe, by again mashing it up with Mercury Rev (whose 2001 follow-up to Deserter's Songs, All Is Dream, was similarly fine but a bit of a fall-off from its predecessor), I could make it a little more interesting?  

And the result is pretty great.

As with the last one, the similar aesthetics of the two records allowed me to alternate back-and-forth between the bands and have it still sound like a unified album, maybe just a notch more erratic than my prior mix. As Soft Bulletin & Deserter's Songs were my favorite LPs by the two bands, it can't help but be a bit less impressive; but on the flipside, because I'm less enamored of the two source albums, culling the highlights of each (plus a few contemporaneous outtakes for each band) resulted in a whole I find stronger than its parts.

Once again, I spent a lot of time editing some of the longer tracks and cross-fading everything so it plays like an old-school epic concept album. Alas, I couldn't replicate that on the Spotify playlist below.